There's some breaking news out of Europe with one country that wants to put to a vote the idea of
taxing citizens no matter where they live. US-style citizenship-based taxation. There's a sinister
twist in this one. We're going to share the article and what you should know.
And we told you a couple months ago that in France, one of the candidates for high office said
let's have US-style citizenship-based taxation. No more leaving France,
keeping the passport and not paying. Citizens must pay. Now that candidate did not win,
but what have I told you for years? When the ideas get out into the ecosystem,
someone else will eventually pick up and run with them. And that is the case in France. We're
going to share the article from EME. I'm here in Madrid. We're filming Live Like a King. Hope
you'll check out our Live Like a King in Kuala Lumpur. We've got a lot more that we're
filming coming up, but I wanted to take a moment to share this with you. French finance
committee adopts Bill aiming to introduce citizenship-based taxation. Now we've told you
for years, the United States does this. If you're a US passport holder, you're going to be under
the radar of the IRS no matter where you move. You have to fill out tax returns. You may have to
pay something. We help Americans and many other nationalities legally reduce their taxes,
but it is harder for Americans. There is more to do. France wants to do the same.
And what you're going to see in this article is a number of things I've been telling you
for years. It's all coming home to roost. France's finance committee has adopted an amendment
to establish a quote-unquote targeted universal tax requiring French citizens living in countries
with lower tax rates to continue paying taxes to France. So we're going to get into the details
here in a moment, but basically what this is speaking to is what I've told you for years,
they may look at some sort of backdoor tax. The United States is pretty bold. We tax you no
matter where you live. Yes, there's exclusions. Yes, there's exemptions. If you're an
entrepreneur, you can ring fence a lot of your income and reduce your tax rate usually to the
single digits, but I've told you other countries will bring in a tax on citizens through the
backdoor. And just to be clear, that means that means if you hold a French passport,
even if you don't live there, you may be taxed. We'll talk about that. The proposed system
would require French nationals who lived in France for at least three years within the
last decade before relocating to pay taxes equivalent to their hypothetical French tax burden.
So there's the beginning of the sinister twist. If you have lived there for three out of the last
10 years, they're going to keep you in that tax debt. Kind of what California was talking about,
hey, if you lived here for any part of the last decade, we're going to go after you and we're
going to basically say, hey, it's as if you never left. So France is saying if you lived here
for three of the last 10 years, if you have French citizenship by descent, if you grew
up in France and moved away a long time ago, perhaps you will be exempt. But if you've lived
in France for three of the last 10 years, they want to rope you in and make you pay taxes
equivalent to your hypothetical French tax burden to prevent double taxation. How kind of them.
The amendment outlines a tax credit mechanism for French citizens living abroad.
Here's the second part of the sinister twist and what I've been telling you for years,
somebody would do this. Under this framework, they must pay taxes equivalent to what they
owe in France, but they will receive a credit matching any taxes already paid in their
country of residence that standard. But unlike the American model of citizenship based taxation,
which affects all US citizens globally, the French proposal targets only those living
in countries with tax rates at least 50% lower than France's. For years now, we saw more
headlines this summer, a number of French citizens moving to Belgium for lower taxes.
Imagine, I know Belgium has a few things going for it, but imagine in general moving to
Belgium for lower taxes. Many people over the years, including recently from France,
have moved across the border to French speaking Belgium to lower their taxes. We'll talk about
that in a second. Under this proposal, you may be able to get away with doing that and they
leave you alone. But to me, you know, one of the things people say is, well, I don't want to
leave my family. I don't want to do this. I don't want to do that. You know, if you're
going to make a move, what do we always say? If you're going to move, you might as well
move. If you're going to move to lower your taxes, you might as well move to somewhere
where you can lower them dramatically. If you're going to upend your life, if you're
going to put the kids in different schools, yes, you want the good lifestyle. We film
Live Like a King to show you, you can have a good lifestyle in a lot of places.
Yes, you can have a good lifestyle, but why not lower, you know, why do you want to lower
your taxes just a little bit? It's like people in the US say, oh, I'm moving from
California to Arizona. Okay, you're going to save a few percentage points, but you're going
from, you know, net net, you know, 50% tax to 44% tax. Is that worth all that effort?
Same thing. Is it worth it to move from France somewhere else in Europe that has,
you know, relatively high taxes for most people? Well, that's what France is hoping you'll do,
because they no longer believe that as their citizen, you're entitled to being part of the
community. You are now, as Doug Casey says, you are now a milk cow. You're a dairy cow to be
milked. And so if you don't go where they want you to go, well, they're going to tax you
as if you never left France. So that's the sinister twist. Again, I told you,
and I said this specifically about Europe in the last year or two, they might say, hey,
if you move somewhere we like, if it's on the nice list, okay, go and save your 10%,
go and save your 20%. By the way, who controls 50% of what? They can raise their taxes as high
as they want. Remember the 75% tax rate was not under a hold. I mean, 50% of any number
they choose, there's people in the United States saying bring back 91%, you know,
top tax rates that existed under Eisenhower. Okay, if you pay 50% of 91%, they get to choose
what you pay. The scope extends beyond income tax to include inheritance tax, capital gains,
and dividends that are roping it all in. This is the repeat of a 2019 fact-finding mission
from Finance Committee Chairman, Eric Coquerel and Jean-Paul Matai, where they talked about
applying a sort of citizenship-based tax to those who moved to low-tax jurisdictions.
I don't remember if we read that report particularly, but I've been telling you
for four or five years that we read these think tank reports and these little things that we come
out through the tax journals we read, and that's where I've gotten this idea. I'm not just making
it up. It's not just, hmm, it's coming to me. I read stuff that the average person doesn't see
that's not in the newspaper because we get these arcane tax journals and newsletters and all
the stuff we subscribe to around here for our research work. And we see the kind of stuff
that they're talking about behind closed doors. And I figure, hey, how many years is that
before that kind of thing becomes a reality? So in France, it wasn't Lucy Caste, who was the
person running for, I believe, was president early this summer. She did not get in, but she
wasn't the first one in France to propose this. And so I've been telling you for years,
other countries, Canada, perhaps Australia, European Union countries, are at least going
to make it harder for you to get out. And I've said there's going to be a movement
towards some sort of backdoor citizenship-based taxation. So in the case of France, it will
be, if you move to somewhere we like, great, we will perhaps leave you alone, at least until
we jack up our taxes so high that that other place looks like a tax haven in comparison.
The National Rally Party supports the measure with their member of parliament, Jean-Philippe
Tanguay, linking it to citizenship rights and duties. Who said that first? As Western
countries get increasingly more desperate, as they realize they're broke, as they lose their
share at the top of the world economy food chain, because they've been there just kind of,
I mean, we're here in Spain. And Madrid has been very nice. But I've said for years,
how is Spain the 10th largest economy in the world? Kind of by default, as the Indonesians and the
countries like that pick up steam, the Brazilians, it all, a place like Spain, a place like France,
it's not going to be at the top of the food chain anymore. You may not realize
that sitting in Europe or sitting in North America, that your country has increasing competition,
I realize it traveling all around the world. And so what I tie that to is this increasing push
among politicians in these increasingly broke Western countries of saying, it used to be,
oh, you're French, you're one of us, please, you're living in Dubai, come to the embassy,
we'll have snacks for you once a month. There are countries that do that. They're
shifting from that. Oh, thank goodness you're one of us. So we don't care if you're paying
0% tax, as long as you don't, you know, driving the roads and bridges. Now it's, oh, you carry our
passport. Oh yeah, you're one of us. Oh, well to be one of us, you have to pay. You don't get to
move somewhere else. And by the way, we don't care if you move somewhere else because you
just happen to like it better. We don't care why you move, because what I've seen personally,
having given up U.S. citizenship, sure, you know, not having to deal with the IRS,
that's always a nice thing. Was that the reason I did it? No, not really. You know, and so
how many people believe that? I'm sure there's a lot of people who don't. And I'm sure people
running for office talking to, with this article mentions, you know, the average middle-class
worker, do you think they take very kindly to my choice to leave? No, I'm a political target,
and I realize that. And so you can be a political target in your country. Oh, yeah,
he's living for Dubai. And so we're seeing this serious shift from you're one of us to be one of us
if you pay. I've predicted. Now, what have I said? If you hold a Western passport, you need to have
a second passport. Good news is if you're French, you can't have a second passport. We've had a few
French citizen clients over the years who were entitled to other European citizenship by descent.
You can go to the Caribbean and get citizenship by investment in under a year
by making a donation. You can go to other parts of the world and make real estate
investments or other investments and get citizenship in under a year.
Those programs are going up in price. And I would argue it's not entirely coincidental
that the European Union pushes back on some of the Caribbean programs to add more requirements,
add more steps, which has lengthened the process. Why? They don't want you leaving.
They don't want they don't want you to pay $200,000 and have a good at a jail
free card that if they decide to tax you for the privilege of being born there,
even if you don't want to live in their country a single day a year anymore,
they don't want you to be able to leave. They don't like that you have options. It angers them.
There's a lot of people in Paris working for think tanks who don't pay taxes at all
that want you to pay a lot of taxes. Those are the ones that don't want you to have options.
And so what do you do when someone doesn't want you to have options? Well, that's a pretty
strong single to me that you need to have options. Like when someone who wants to take
something from you wants to stop you from having options. That's like, yeah, I think I need something.
Now, again, I've been saying this for years. I'm ringing the alarm bell now. Who knows if this
makes it through? But it's the second time in a matter of months we're talking to you about this.
I don't think France will be the first or the last. I think we've talked about how Australia's
kind of tiptoeing ever so slowly into this. If there's talk of this in Canada, there's
increasing talk just from the average person that you see, how dare you carry our passport
if you don't pay. That is not what people said even 10 years ago in the early days of Nomadic
Capitalist. It was, hey, if you don't want to live here, that's cool. People are more and more
angry. And so you need a second passport. Why? Because if one day something like this goes
through and you want to live somewhere else, the answer is, okay, well, you know what?
If I have to pay millions of euros to a country I don't even live in,
maybe not only for the money's sake, because it's personally insulting, I don't want to be French,
or I don't want to be whatever other country tries to do this. And how am I going to get out of that?
Well, the process is longer than it was a year ago to get a second passport by investment.
The process will probably get longer as more little bureaucratic burdens get added.
Good idea to do it now. If you start today, if you go to nomadiccapitalist.com
slash apply, and you want to work with us, yeah, within a year you can have a second passport in
many cases. And so then you're prepared no matter what happens. What you don't want to do is wait
for the law to go through and then be scrambling as so many people over the years have done
when they come to us. And hey, we can save them money in the long run, but it's too late to
take the big hit, just save the big hit because they waited too long. So you'll want to get
the second passport before you need the second passport. At a certain point, I just enjoy
having passports at this point. I'm beyond the point of strategy for the most part. Although,
hey, more options are more options. But if you're looking at your second passport, you got to have
that one before you need it. I've spent a lot of money, I've invested, I've done a lot of
stuff over the years to get citizenships because I wanted to have different options.
I wanted to have different places I can call home. And there is a sentimental side to it
as well. But first, you want to make sure you can protect yourself, protect your wealth.
And as someone who's been through this, protect yourself from your own country turning on you
and flipping what you thought was a cherished benefit into an entitled obligation on you.
We'd be happy to help nomadcapitalist.com slash apply. We'll keep you updated. But the next
update, it may be too late. And it may be, hey, you got to pay.